Death; Skirts; Baby

Last week three notorious U. S. kidnapping cases, varying in age from one to four years, were still knocking about the nation's courts in the following fashions:

"Inescapable Evidence." In Trenton, New Jersey's Court of Errors & Appeals handed down its decision in the case of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who kidnapped and murdered Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. near Hopewell in March 1932, was caught with ransom money in The Bronx in September 1934, was convicted and sentenced to death at Flemington in February 1935. Unanimously the 13 voting members of New Jersey's highest court upheld the trial court on all 16 contested points of law, declared that the German carpenter's conviction was "one to which the evidence inescapably led." In a forlorn effort to save Hauptmann from the electric chair sometime before Christmas, defense counsel considered appealing to the U. S. Supreme Court on an unindicated point of constitutional law, to the State Pardon Board for clemency, to State courts for another trial on grounds of new evidence.

Said Prisoner Hauptmann, just ten years married, in his Trenton death cell: "My God, won't this be a terrible anniversary present for my Annie!"

Said Mrs. Anna Hauptmann in her Bronx flat: "I hope and pray the true facts will come out before they can do anything to my poor man."

Said Father Lindbergh at the Glenn L. Martin airplane factory in Baltimore: "No comment."

Absent Transvestite. In the Federal district court at Louisville a kidnapping trial began without the actual snatcher. To tne witness stand went rich young Alice Speed Stoll, daughter-in-law of a Louisville oilman, to tell how Thomas H. Robinson Jr. had abducted her from her suburban home in October 1934, held her captive in an Indianapolis apartment for the next six days while dickering for $50,000 ransom (TIME, Oct. 20, 1934). 'Napper Robinson's eccentricity is transvestitism. Since he habitually wears women's clothes, Government agents have not yet been able to pick up his trail.

At the bar of justice last week were Robinson's wife, to whom Mrs. Stoll was once grateful for conveying her back home, and Robinson's father, a Nashville. Tenn. engineer who rejected the ransom when it was sent to his house, went to Government agents for advice, became intermediary only after persuasion from the Stolls. Things began to look bad for Robinson Sr., however, when Government agents revealed that they had found in his Nashville home a floor plan of his son's Indianapolis hideout. But the Louisville jury took only seven and a half hours to acquit both Father and Wife Robinson. The latter announced that she would forthwith seek divorce from her fugitive husband on grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment. During their engagement, he shot her in the leg.

Mrs. Muench. One of the first big latter-day abductions was that of Dr. Isaac Dee Kelley, prominent St. Louis physician, in April 1931. Nearly three years later a local poolroom proprietor weighing 350 lb. declared that the job had been executed by a group of male underworldlings, that one Nellie Tipton Muench, a lively redhead who kept a dress shop and whose husband is a physician, whose brother is a Justice of Missouri's Supreme Court, had lured Dr. Kelley from his home. Of the underworldlings indicted, one escaped, two got stiff sentences, one is in prison awaiting trial. Mrs. Muench's trial was delayed by legal dodges.

When she was finally brought to the bar in Mexico, Mo. fortnight ago, the prosecution produced testimony that Mrs. Muench associated with bad men who called her "Goldie," that she had been arrested for larceny. A jury of farmers and shopkeepers nevertheless turned Mrs. Muench loose.

Last August Mrs. Muench claimed to have given birth to a baby, "a gift from God in my time of distress." Last week Missouri Justice was still after Mrs. Muench, investigating charges that the infant was a Pennsylvania servant girl's bastard.

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